“When I heard Caruso, I was just blown away by those high notes. I was five years old and I thought, ‘What fun to sing these high notes’.

The Pearl Fishers has a particular melody that I just love. You hear that trill at the end? That’s what got me. It’s like a bumble bee stinging you for life. To do that trill with your voice and do it with finesse, on a melody that’s got heart to it, that was the disease I caught – right there”.

Art paste zijn muzikale zang-smaak meteen toe. “I was singing at age six, ‘Unchained Melody’ in school. The kids would leave the class and I’d sneak back up the stairwell before I walked home and spend another half-hour with nobody around just because the stairwell has good sound. ‘Unchained Melody’ was a hit, so was ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’, that great goose bump ballad from ‘Carousel’. This is when I learned about inspirational ballads and the fun of singing with reverberation. I was popular. It was fun to be a singer, which became my identity starting at age six”.

“It’s always amusing; it’s fun, the celebrity trip I’ve been on for twenty-something years. It’s a constant party of a kind. It’s a potential magical encounter with everyone. A fan meets a hero, he knows him from the albums. They start off with ‘Are you who I think you are?’ or ‘Can I have your autograph?’ They’re open to whatever the exchange may be”.

“I often get very probing. I get into surprisingly serious conversations, things that in the normal course of socializing you’d back off from. But you find people say, ‘Well, it’s a celebrity situation, I’ll say things I wouldn’t normally say’.

For years I’ve been using the vantage point of the celebrity life to be curious about people. You can be a reporter. They’re getting a kick out of meeting you, but you’re using the celebrity thing to really make contact with them”.

Vroeger was het anders geweest. “As a kid I was a loner. When I achieved public recognition, it was a huge stroke of affection, and it gave me an ‘in’ with which to make contact with people”.

Er was echter een schaduwkant aan het bekend zijn. Als je met iemand in een diepgaand gesprek raakte kwamen er vaak mensen tussenbeide. “Say a friend is explaining to you what it was that’s always been hurting him or her about something you have always done. And it’s a quality understanding, you really don’t want interruption.

But as a celebrity, you’re always a walking target. And you really are required to have your grace about it; they don’t know what they’re interrupting. You can lose some of your private life to it”.

Art Garfunkel zocht een andere route. Hij wilde vanaf naar de plek waar hij woonde – aan de oostkust – helemaal naar de andere kant van het Amerikaanse continent lopen. Niet in één keer, maar bij stukjes en beetjes. “I leave my house, I fly out to the state where I last left off on my walk, and I rent a car at the airport and drive to my last spot, then I do about a week of walking, covering 100 to 120 miles. In general, I’m doing the smallest paved road that takes me west”.

De artiest was, vertelde hij in 1989, niet altijd even blij met wat hij onderweg moest ervaren. “In part, I’m seeing how uninspired America is. The landscape seems to change with time much more rapidly than I thought. I try to look at what is no longer on earth, things that existed up until just recently. Unless we try to notice the absence of things, they’ll just slip away”.

Van kleine stadjes van weleer was vaak niet veel meer over. De mensen waren er uit weggetrokken. “They’ve all gone to the cities. Small towns do not look charmingly small; they look sadly departed-from. Evidently the power of television or pop culture has pulled off the young people toward the cities”.

In wat er over gebleven was, vond hij, was het plaatselijke-regionale karakter verloren gegaan. “Why did we get this way? Is this homogenization the by-product of ‘business comes first’?”

I often play this game: I say, ‘What would he be doing here? Besides, isn’t he taller?’

They seem to agree. Then maybe I’ll say ‘Should I feel flattered? What’s he like? Where does he live?’ I want them to say: ‘I know who you are; what is it like to be a celebrity? What makes it different from my life?’ That would be the more direct expression of natural curiosity”.

Garfunkel was geen huichelaar. Hij vond het maar wat leuk om een celebrity te zijn. “It’s way more good than bad to achieve public recognition for singing. When people talk about the price of fame or the difficulties, they are certainly describing the minor aspects of it all. There are many positive things: the chance to express yourself, the ability to get closer to the back room. It increases awareness of how things work”.

Wie daar een andere mening over uitte was volgens hem gewoon een leugenaar. “They lie. Nobody gets onto the top of the charts by accident. There’s no one who was ever dragged there, or woke up there. They have rehearsed, and they have set out to match a vision of, as Norman Podhoretz said, ‘making it’”.

In 1989 was Art Garfunkel nog lang niet op de westkust beland. Hij moest nog besluiten dat hij een noordelijke route zou kiezen. In 1996 wel. In dat jaar liet hij vastleggen: “Somewhere around 1984, I left my New York apartment, cut across Central Park, and went past my alma mater Columbia University, across the George Washington Bridge and I was in New Jersey. Most of the time I was alone with my Sony walkman and my notebook in my pocket.

In the 1980s I was doing a lot of writing. Bits that I would call prose poems. So I reflected on what’s going on in the United States. Over forty more excursions, about three a year, taking about twelve years, I crossed the entire United States.

I was left almost totally alone. There were times that the press latched onto me and then I would have to strike a deal. ‘If you leave me alone, I’ll give you an interview in the coffee shop in the town I’m about to come to’. That happened a little. But I was never really hassled and I find the world is a safe place. Almost the entire world is trying to mind their own business and stay out of trouble and find their way to heaven in their own way. They just can’t be bothered with you”.

“It was an incredible time. It was as exciting as the dawn of sex. You have to remember, prior to this, it was Patti Page and The Four Aces. Things were mono and not so exciting. Yes, the 1950s were still mono, but with this new music you had grooves, and you got down and dirty”.

Terecht, vond hij. “It really summed up the music we were hearing, the grooves that got to us. It’s lovemaking after midnight”.

Alan Freed

In zijn jonge jaren was Art een fan van Debbie Reynolds (‘Tammy’: I loved that one. It was fun!) en Nat ‘King’ Cole. Vooral ‘Too Young’ (uit 1951) was van betekenis geweest. “I made ‘Too Young’ by Nat King Cole my own personal song. I sang it in the talent shows in school when Paul Simon sat in the audience. I was 10 years old, and hey, the girls liked little Artie singing ‘Too Young’. That became my signature song”.

En toen kwam de muziek voor de nieuwe Amerikaanse jeugd. Een van die liedjes was ‘Sh-Boom’ (1954) van de Crew Cuts. “I began to see the format for how you arrange a song. You could have a lead singer and a clever background. ‘Dooey-ooo, sh-boom, sh-boom. Dooey-ooo’. And then, with that backing of two-part harmony, the lead singer could step forward: ‘Life could be a dream, if I could take you up in paradise up above’.

That was a nice, breezy melody with the lead singer up front and two backing voices. In terms of arrangement, that format was new to me – and I fell for it. I was just a little pee-wee kid from Queens, and I loved the way it all fit together. It became the format for so many R&B records: Dion and the Belmonts, The Penguins – they all did it”.

Art: “‘Won’t you let me take you on a sea cruise?’ – nothing rocked quite like this record. For me, it was the door opening to rock & roll. From The Crows’ ‘Gee’ to The Moonglows’ ‘Sincerely’ to ‘Story Untold’ by The Nutmegs”.

Speciale bewondering had Garfunkel voor ‘You send me’ (1957) van Sam Cooke (“He opened his throat and out poured great pitch and great diction. A tremendous, first-rate singer”), ‘It’s not for me to say’ (1957) van Johnny Mathis (“If you’re a singer like me, you went crazy the first time you heard his voice”) en ‘River Deep Mountain High’ van Ike & Tina Turner.

Art Garfunkel luisterde op een bijzondere manier naar liedjes. Niet als ‘consument’ maar als zanger. Dat bleek bij zijn favoriete Beatles-song, geschreven door Paul McCartney. “‘Here, There And Everywhere’ – of all The Beatles’ records, this one truly intoxicated me. It’s beautiful in every way a song can be. You have to be in some kind of magical mood to come up with something this enchanting”.